When the Black Death struck Europe in the Middle Ages, the fundamental values that held society together broke down. Husbands and wives abandoned each other and mother’s abandoned their children. This void of ethics that overtook the population is described in Boccaccio’s Decameron, considered a masterpiece of Italian prose and a documentary of life during that time. The book describes the…
Death Far from the Lava: Why Distance Didn’t Matter
By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News
Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — June 30, 2026
One of the most persistent misunderstandings about the Permian–Triassic extinction event is the idea that it was confined to places near massive volcanic eruptions. The geological record says otherwise. Regions untouched by lava still experienced widespread collapse.
Distance did not offer…
Scientists say that multiple Earth system components appear closer to destabilization than previously believed, putting the planet in increa
Scientists say that multiple Earth system components appear closer to destabilization than previously believed, putting the planet in increased danger of following a "hothouse" path driven by feedback loops that can amplify the consequences of global warming.
Published today in the journal One Earth, a paper titled "The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory" is an analysis by an international collaboration led by Oregon State University's William Ripple that synthesizes scientific findings on climate feedback loops and 16 tipping elements—Earth subsystems that may undergo loss of stability if critical temperature thresholds are passed.
Those sharp changes could likely result in a cascade of subsystem interactions that would steer the planet toward a path to extreme warming and sea level rise—conditions that could be difficult to reverse on human timescales, even with deep emissions cuts.
"After a million years of oscillating between ice ages separated by warmer periods, Earth's climate stabilized more than 11,000 years ago, enabling agriculture and complex societies," said Ripple, distinguished professor of ecology in the OSU College of Forestry. "We're now moving away from that stability and could be entering a period of unprecedented climate change."
Key climate tipping elements at risk
Tipping elements include ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, mountain glaciers, sea ice, boreal forests and permafrost, the Amazon rainforest and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a system of ocean currents that's a key influencer of global climate.
The researchers note that nearly 10 years after the Paris Agreement, which sought to limit long-term average warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, global temperature increases exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius for 12 consecutive months—a period that also included extreme, deadly and costly wildfires; floods, and other climate-related natural disasters.
"Temperature limit exceedance is usually evaluated using 20-year averages, but climate model simulations suggest the recent 12-month breach indicates the long-term average temperature increase is at or near 1.5 degrees," said study co-author Christopher Wolf, a former OSU postdoctoral researcher who is now a scientist with Corvallis-based Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates, known as TERA.
"It's likely that global temperatures are as warm as—or warmer than—at any point in the last 125,000 years and that climate change is advancing faster than many scientists predicted.
"It's also likely that carbon dioxide levels are the highest they've been in at least two million years, the scientists say. At more than 420 parts per million, the atmospheric CO2 concentration is about 50% higher than it was prior to the Industrial Revolution.
Recent climate projections may be underestimating the pace of global warming in an atmosphere damaged by greenhouse gas emissions, because the interaction of powerful climate feedback loops that can accelerate warming are not well-represented in key climate models, an international team of scientists concluded in a study published today in the journal One Earth. Their […]
Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:
Recent climate projections may be underestimating the pace of global warming in an atmosphere damaged by greenhouse gas emissions, because the interaction of powerful climate feedback loops that can accelerate warming are not well-represented in key climate models, an international team of scientists concluded in a study published today in the journal One Earth. Their findings suggest that efforts to reduce emissions require even more urgency to avoid worst-case climate outcomes, the team reported.
“If amplifying feedbacks are strong enough, the result is likely tragic climate change moving beyond anything humans can control,” said co-author Bill Ripple, an ecologist at Oregon State University, and co-founder of the Alliance of World Scientists, which has 26,000 members in 180 countries urging decisive implementation of policies to curb global warming and meet the commitments governments made under the 2015 Paris Agreement.
“We would like to see an IPCC special report that focuses on the many risky climate feedbacks and the possible acceleration towards planetary tipping points,” he said. “It’s important to understand the most optimistic estimates, but we also need to be informed of potential worst-case scenarios.”
Recent evaluations conclude that, if countries meet the emissions-reduction targets they’ve set for themselves, the average global temperature would warm 2.7 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial temperatures by 2100, which would have catastrophic impacts for people and ecosystems. But if some of the feedback loops shown in the new paper accelerate, warming could soar well above that level, toward 4 degrees Celsius, by the end of the century.
Climate feedbacks are physical, chemical and biological processes in the ocean, atmosphere and on land that, in most cases, reinforce each other to speed up warming. One example is melting sea ice that allows the ocean to absorb more sunlight, which warms the water, to melt more ice. The new paper also describes several climate feedback loops that could have a cooling effect, like when trees fertilized by increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide grow faster, thus taking up more CO2.
The researchers examined 41 climate feedback loops and found 27 that significantly increase warming but may not be fully accounted for in climate models. Ripple said scientists generally understand the feedback loops individually, but that the models often overlook the cumulative effect all of them together might have over the next 50 to 80 years.
Carbon emissions, ocean acidification, Amazon clearing all hurtling toward new records
A new study tracking the planet’s vital signs has found that many of the key indicators of the global climate crisis are getting worse and either approaching, or exceeding, key tipping points as the earth heats up.
Overall, the study found some 16 out of 31 tracked planetary vital signs, including greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean heat content and ice mass, set worrying new records.
“There is growing evidence we are getting close to or have already gone beyond tipping points associated with important parts of the Earth system,” said William Ripple, an ecologist at Oregon State University who co-authored the new research, in a statement.
euronews: Special report: What's really happening in the Arctic and Siberia?Draining lakes, advancing forests, and sinking permafrost - we witness the reality of climate change in western Siberia and bring you the latest Copernicus data on the Arctic region.
“In all, there are several feedback loops that reinforce one another, each one influencing another such that, like a whirling merry-go-round of horse carvings that spins out of control to hyper speed, features of individual horses become a whirling blur. That’s runaway global warming!” counterpunch Robert Hunziker
